There’s probably a lot of “sins of sales,” certain things that a salesperson should not do under any circumstances. But there’s a few things in particular that make it difficult to succeed in the sales world.
The infographic is based on the ebook of the same name.

These sins are categorized under the 6 W’s: Who, What, When, Why, Where, hoW.

1. Who: Selling to the wrong buyer. This is a big sin! If you sell to the wrong buyer, any possibility of closing a sale is eliminated. Customers who don’t have a significant enough need, selling to someone who cannot make purchasing decisions, and those who aren’t in the target market, are the wrong buyer.
2. What: Lack of knowledge. Make sure that you know enough about your customer, the industry, and your product. Don’t be afraid to ask questions!
3. When: Bad timing. Timing is critical, and when you have bad timing, it can even cost you the sale.
4. Why: Not learning from winning and losing. If you aren’t learning from your mistakes as a salesperson, you will very quickly fall behind your colleagues and lose profits. Operate on a growth model, where each loss is a chance for growth.
5. Where: Wrong place at the wrong time. If you don’t understand your buyers’ process or use the wrong tactics at the wrong time, you’re putting your sale at risk.
6. How: Outdated methods or no methods. If you use a methodology that is not up to date, it simply isn’t worth it. Using old programs that do not help you keep up with today’s fast-paced world are not worthy of your time.

There are a lot of sins in the business world, including 6 Deadly Sins of CRM. This correlates directly with sin six, “how.” If your CRM system is out of date and not helping you solve problems or meet your needs as a company, you are shorting yourself valuable time and profits.

Accountability is the new sales buzzword

It can be difficult to grab the attention of customers. Especially in the era of technology, there is more information than ever available to consumers. This is a frustrating situation, both for salespeople and consumers alike. The internet is flooded with information that doesn’t always exceed quality expectations. This can be mislead to customers, who are frustrated when they aren’t able to get their needs met. This is also frustrating to salespeople, who genuinely have good products and want people to use them, but struggle to stand out in the noise of the lackluster competitors.

In order to optimize customer engagement, there are 6 key steps to follow.

1. Go Beyond Activity: It’s not always about getting the most done. Productivity is certainly important, but it’s crucial that quality work is completed and real connections are made.
2. Focus on Current Customers: Growing your business doesn’t always mean growing your customer base. You can engage with existing customers, as opposed to acquiring new ones, in order to grow your business and optimize customer engagement with the clients that already know, trust, and have a relationship with you.
3. Align Messaging to Fit the Individual: One message does not fit all. It is not always beneficial to send out mass messages, or generic emails. Instead, use what you know about the individual to tailor their messages.
4. Embrace Technology: The tools are out there, so use them! If you’re not taking advantage of the programs designed to help you, you’re not being as effective at optimizing customer engagement as you could be.
5. Measure Your Own Engagement: To be as successful as possible, measure your own personal engagement!
6. Measure Client Engagement: Understanding your client and their willingness to engage with you can help you manage your client’s engagement with you.

If you’re interested in learning more about improving your customer engagement, SalesPOP! is here to help with articles and key information about pulling in more customers. Articles like Developing Deeper Customer Engagements in the Digital Age, and What Are Your Customers Saying? will help you learn more.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

Sales and Marketing have long struggled to align in a cohesive way. These two teams are both very different, but also very necessary. When they are disjointed or do not collaborate, huge problems can ensure that will end up costing you customers and losing the company revenue. 70% of the buyer’s journey takes place before the customer ever speaks to a salesperson. Therefore, it’s especially crucial during the early stages of your customer’s buyers’ cycle, that the sales and marketing team provide a united front to consumers.

Here are seven reasons why sales and marketing alignment pays.

To help you understand how to better unify these two teams, SalesPOP! has composed 7 Reasons Why Sales and Marketing Alignment Pays Off.

1. Get on the radar of your ideal customer: Make sure the people seeing your content are the right ones! Position things correctly to ensure that it fits seamlessly into what your idea customers are already looking at.
2. Offer real value to your buyers: Use high quality, useful content and deliver on your promises.
3. Increase the likelihood of making your prospect’s short list: In order to do this, help clients understand their problems, and how your product or service can be the solution.
4. Build brand awareness: Do what you can to make your company the “go to.”
5. Increase the number of quality leads: Tailor content for your buyer persona, and attract more of your ideal customer.
6. Accelerate your sales cycle: Creating quality content will help prospects research quickly, and make decisions faster.
7. If you won’t, your competition will: Potential prospects searching for new information on what product to buy will either read yours, or they will be reading your competitions. Make sure they are reading yours.

SalesPOP! has a whole topic dedicated to the alignment of sales and marketing. For more information on aligning these two teams, check out one of the numerous articles, including Sales and Marketing (Finally) Working Together, and Sales and Marketing: What They Both Need to Learn.

Embrace the Work, and Don’t Be Afraid to Get Dirty!

Achievement is a messy affair, and if you are NOT prepared to get dirty, chances are you won’t reach your desired destination. Success is not always the elegant result of a formula but requires the sometimes messy route to get to where you plan.

But what exactly does it mean to get dirty for sales success? Roy Osing, the author of the BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series, explains how with these 10 key tips.

1. Make fast decisions: Pondering and over-analyzing doesn’t usually lead to sales success. Take the amount of data that you have, and make a decision. Don’t use valuable resources and waste time by over complicating the route to a decision.
2. Have a Plan B: Let’s be honest, Plan A doesn’t usually work out. Have a backup plan ready to go, and don’t be afraid to use it!
3. Embrace Imperfection: There is no such thing as a perfect solution. Imperfections will always exist, and embracing them will lead you to quicker success.
4. Do it. Try it. Fix it.: Keep your feet moving, don’t lag between decisions.
5. Align yourself with doers: Let others who are passionate about things be contagious! Pick up their passion, and take on their energy.
6. Work outside your comfort zone: Not uncomfortable? You’re playing it too safe!
7. Bend the rules: If you get to a point where a rule is less helpful than helpful, bend it!
8. Do what needs to be done: Your job description is just a guide. Be the person who won’t let anything stand in their way.
9. Avoid multitasking: Be wary of long, lengthy lists, and tackling too many things at once.
10. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes: Make mistakes. Those who follow the growth model, and learn from their mistakes, achieve greater sales success.

If you want to succeed, take a look at your hands. If they’re dirty, you’re on the right path! Take a look at For Sales Success Tell The Truth, and Sales Success in 2018.

People First Approach!

Pipeliner CRM gives you the ability to easily assign multiple contacts to multiple accounts, making things more streamlined and easier than ever. We’ve talked a lot about the importance of having a good sales pipeline software here at SalesPOP!, and we back Pipeliner CRM as the top of the line, state of the art, best CRM software for Sales and the pipeliner process.

The software is ever evolving and changing, just as the sales world is ever evolving and changing. Pipeliner aims to create a software that keeps up with these changes, helping you navigate through this sometimes confusing process by creating the most up to date tools. As part of this mission to stay abreast with sales trends, Pipeliner has added a new feature that will allow salespeople to adapt to new internal processes, channels, and systems, and ultimately to put your customer or prospect at the center. Pipeliner CRM has turned the classic Account-to-Contacts model on its head. We call it “1-to-Many with Any.”

So what else is new with Pipeliner CRM?

1. You can now set up accounts: All CRMs enable you to set up accounts that you do business with.
2. Associate contacts with accounts: Most CRMs allow you to set up contacts associated with those accounts.
3. Identify primary contacts: Some CRMs enable you to identify a primary contact at a given account.
4. Connect 1 to many with any! Only ONE CRM, Pipeliner CRM, gives you the ability to easily assign multiple contacts to multiple accounts and set primary for each.

A sales process is a systematic, repeatable series of steps that map out and track interaction with prospects from their first point of engagement with your business through to a close.

Sales Management Tool

The right sales management tool will enable you to track the performance of your sales process and manage the staff that are responsible for using it. It is absolutely imperative that you utilize a sales management tool if you want to be successful as a company and make the most of the journey through each sales process. Trying to be a sales manager without having a sales management tool is a little like trying to row a canoe without an order. You won’t get very far, or be very successful.

SalesPOP! has generated five reasons why you need a leading edge sales management tool.

1. Manage your sales force effectively and fairly: Use your CRM to objectively and analytically manage things, and level the playing field for all sales reps
2. Forecast upcoming sales: Who doesn’t want to be able to tell the future? Use your CRM to forecast upcoming sales
3. Promote sales and marketing alignment: Sales and marketing have long struggled to align in a cohesive and integrated way. Use your CRM to help ease both teams into a sales and marketing alignment.
4. Close more deals: Closing deals is the ultimate goal. There’s a tool out there that will help you close deals in the quickest and most efficient way possible, so use it!
5. Make data easily accessible: Keep everything in one place. You don’t need a myriad of different apps and programs to do what you need, all of your data is in one easily accessible spot.

Pipeliner CRM strives to be the leading edge in CRM technology and can help you all five things listed above, and more. Check out the website to download your free trial and understand all of the things it can do for you. Sales Management Through Pipeliner CRM is a great blog article written by Pipeliner CEO Nikolaus Kimla that discusses the vital parts of sales management utilizing Pipeliner CRM.Get your free trial of Pipeliner CRM now.

If you’re in the sales world, you probably already understand how important it is to have a CRM software. There’s a lot of different options available, and each of them has their own set of unique features. Pipeliner CRM is a top of the cline program that will help you endlessly, solving problems you didn’t even realize you had. It will make you more efficient, more productive, and help keep you organized, with everything you need in one place.

We’ve laid out a visual infographic to showcase the unique features of Pipeliner CRM. Take a look, and get to know the product. If you’re interested, get your free trial of Pipeliner CRM now.

1. We visualize everything: Pipeliner has a visual, intuitive interface. It makes everything really easy to use, and you won’t be searching everywhere for that one button. You can see things like one-click reports, comprehensive charts, pipeline bubble chart, sales task board, contacts, accounts, and more.
2. We put efficiency and productivity first: Pipeliner has a hybrid cloud model, so it’s always available, online or offline. Sales Managers can stay productive and focused no matter where they are. Plus you can access extra tools like the mobile app, configure actions and activities, manage multiple pipelines, and get important alerts and reminders.
3. We provide the best value for the money: Pipeline services can be so expensive. They are great tools, but if they’re too expensive, and you’re not utilizing all of the features, it can be a waste of money. Pipeliner gives you everything you need, and more, with a low license cost. Plus, there’s tons of free stuff, like free customer support, free how-to videos, a free sales reference library, and more.
4. We work great with others: Pipeliner is very integrated, and you can connect many other applications so that everything is in one spot. Applications such as Gmail, Outlook, Google, Office, and more.

To learn more about Pipeliner CRM features!  Get your free trial of Pipeliner CRM now.